A growing dislike for October ‘pinkification’

The White House went pink this month, awash for a night in rose-coloured light. Delta Air Lines painted a huge pink ribbon on one of its planes, dressed flight attendants in pink, and has been selling pink lemonade to passengers. Police departments started using pink handcuffs. Ford is selling “pink warrior” car decals.Gina Kolata | NYT News Service | Updated: October 31, 2015, 10:14 IST

The world's second largest drugmaker says the drug prevented breast cancer from worsening for 20.2 months in a trial involving 165 patients.The White House went pink this month, awash for a night in rose-coloured light. Delta Air Lines painted a huge pink ribbon on one of its planes, dressed flight attendants in pink, and has been selling pink lemonade to passengers. Police departments started using pink handcuffs. Ford is selling "pink warrior" car decals.

Pinkwashing, as some breast cancer activists call it, has become an October rite, to "raise awareness" of breast cancer. Those who promote the pink campaigns say they raise millions of dollars to fight the disease.

But many women with breast cancer hate the spectacle. "I call it the puke campaign," said Marlene McCarthy, the director of the Rhode Island Breast Cancer Coalition, who has metastatic breast cancer. Breast cancer awareness, critics charge, has become a sort of feelgood catch-all, and the ubiquitous pink a marketing opportunity for companies. For all the awareness, they note, breast cancer incidence has been nearly flat and there still is no cure for women whose cancer has spread beyond the breast to other organs, like the liver or bones.

"A lot of us are done with awareness. We want action," Karuna Jaggar, executive director of Breast Cancer Action, an activist group said. Some broader women's health groups agree. "The pinkification of October isn't helping women," said Cindy Pearson, executive director of National Women's Health Network.

Such questions and skepticism come as some organizations are dialing back recommendations for the very screening measures the campaigns promote, recognizing that mammograms can lead to harm like overdiagnosis — finding and treating cancers that would never have become life-threatening — and false-positive results.

Certainly some organizations that receive money from pink campaigns spend at least part of it on research, but the campaigns have rarely made science their main focus. And how much of the money from pink products goes to any breast cancer cause at all is also unclear.

On October 2, the National Breast Cancer Coalition, a nonprofit group, put out a news release calling for "action, not awareness". The coalition's new campaign is called Breast Cancer Deadline 2020 and has a research component, the Artemis Project, that involves working with scientists and funding agencies on developing effective prevention measures (including a vaccine) — both primary prevention and prevention of metastasis in those who do get the disease. While the chance of success may be slim on the group's 2020 timetable, it is part of the organization's emphasis on science and research.

The idea for a pink ribbon, which soon turned into extending pink to anything and everything, began 25 years ago with a 68-year-old California woman, Charlotte Haley, whose sister, daughter, and granddaughter had breast cancer. Haley decided to make a peach-coloured ribbon to draw attention to what she felt was paltry funding for breast cancer research.

With immense pride “India Live” celebrated its 10th national conference in Mumbai from 28th February to 3rd March 2019. The conference turned out to be a gold mine of information, with emphasis on academics, education and exchange of knowledge with leaders in interventional cardiology from both India and abroad.